The paradox of surface, the enigma of weather, the stereoscopic view of the unseen, electrons whirled around until they burst into beams of pure light—these are some of the elements with which the four artists of ‘Elemental Phenomena’ meddle. These works encounter the boundaries of the mystical and the irrational, tuned to that point at which our earth-bound cognitive faculties become disrupted. Curated by Naomi Evans, ‘Elemental Phenomena’ allows us to get behind science’s glistening white lacquered exteriors to reveal the squishy sparking excrescences that both fascinate and repulse us.
Toward the rear of the darkly lit gallery, on a screen that stretches from floor to ceiling, is Robin Fox’s Magnetic Trap (2012). This work uses ‘tune data’ from the Australian Synchrotron, a type of cyclical particle accelerator, located in Melbourne. When electrons are accelerated over bending magnets, electromagnetic radiation is emitted as synchrotron light, which can be a million times brighter than the sun.1 This ‘tune data’ was processed by Fox according to a number of algorithms and filters, the intensity of the sounds correlating to the intensity of the colours. The result is an intense scatter-gun flickering of rapid bursts of piercing light, tightly synchronised to a chaotic granular splintering of harsh experimental noise. Fox’s earlier work, Volta (2005), screened opposite, was created by sending a pure audio signal to an analog cathode ray oscilloscope. When switched to a ‘polar’ mode, the oscilloscope gives a circular display, rather than the conventional left to right wave pattern. The green phosphorescent images exhibit a frenzy of the micro and macrocosm simultaneously, as if we are witness to some ancient cosmic dance between excited sub-atomic particles. The dynamic visualisation of